Quick googling led me to this scan of an article from 1977: https://nature.berkeley.edu/er100/readings/Nef_1977.pdf "An Early Energy Crisis and Its Consequences", looks like a very interesting read.
Thus the crops in the Americas were more specialized regionally because the folks who cultivated them and potential adopters had little reason to make any effort to spread the crops and reach the widespread diversity of foodstuffs available in the Eurasian continent.
Obviously he lays out his other argued sources but this seemed to be a big one as far as something that encourages trade and interaction between civilizations.
I recall there being a mention made of the fact that South America doesn't have very many domesticatable animals.
Another thing I seem to remember from that book is that we do have occasional evidence of various discoveries of the wheel in the Americas, it just never caught on due to lack of cart-pulling beasts. (skimmed the book: evidence of wheels in Mexico, but no Llamas north of the Darien gap)
Besides, preindustrial transport did not happen anywhere on the scale required to transport bulk goods like base nutrients over the distance between latitudes of different biomes. Luxuries and spices, sure, but not basic foodstuff with low value per unit. Even the roman empire never really left their comfort zone of wheat-producing regions.
I think Iraq, Egypt, Iran and India were all as hot as they are now and they all had some of the greatest civilizations. Historically these "countries" spread beyond current political borders which more or less encompasses a continuous stretch of land and I am talking in that sense.
Not really, we are talking 3000 to 4000 years ago and certainly climate was colder then.
When we talk about Egypt we know there were very fertile land and cities then that are desert now. In Mesopotamia there were terrible deforestation done by humans that is recorded on documents and salinization of fertile lands that are now also desert but at the time supported millions of people.
We also know there has been at least two terrible changes in climate that lasted at least years that made the Earth cold and dark linked to volcanic eruptions.
Here's an excerpt from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, discussing education in Brazil which I think is relevant: http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
Reading that, I thought "could it be lasing?". A laser is two parallel mirrors around a medium with electrons in an excited state. Squeezing a crystal will produce electrical energy by piezoelectricity. Crushing a crystal will produce parallel planes, at least momentarily. So the preconditions for lasing exist.
This is still an open question today. Lasing of crystals under pressure may have been observed in some exotic materials.[1] But it doesn't seem to be the main light-emission mechanism in triboluminescence.
Living in Germany is like living in Boston, Chicago or New York, but probably worse: There is winter and you die if you are not prepared. As hard as it sounds, this is a reality that forges the German culture, it puts you in your toes every year.
I was born in Spain, and Spain is cold in winter, but cold being minus two or three Celsius degrees. Having to live with minus 30 degrees Celsius and everything covered by snow, and almost no sunlight is completely different.
But living in Brazil is a shock because their winter is even less winter than in Spain, only Argentina and Chile has a similar winter to Spain and no part of the South hemisphere but New Zealand and Antarctica has something similar to Canada, Russia of North of North America.
In fact, the Brazilians form South(colder) are totally different form the people of the North. More serious, less party going.
> Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World is a book by Mike Davis about the connection between political economy and global climate patterns, particularly El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
50m Chinese & Indian starved to death from drought.
25m South Americans got wiped out by floods.
"All we had left was our slaves", one Brazilian wrote.
I suspect tropical disease may also have been important.
But in North America, settlers were offered land that they could own if they worked it. This produced an environment of many, many small businesses (farmers), forming the basis of a free market and the resulting dynamism.
I don't suppose it is lost on people that if the land provides your needs, it seems you don't develop a lot of knowledge, and if it doesn't you do[1]. And that correlates at least loosely with myths about losing access to the garden of eden by eating from the tree of knowledge.
[1] Sort of a variation on the maxim, "Success makes you complacent, failure makes you smarter."
The bad luck for South America was that they inherited the Portuguese and Spanish structures of society. Europe was not a homogenous mass of countries. Success within Europe varied widely and South America copied the institutions and land laws of the most backwards countries in Europe.
Portugal and Spain could maintain an illusion of success based on all the wealth they got from their plunder and exploitation.
In that century Spain and Portugal were way more advanced that England or any other part of Europe. For example, Cadiz or Cordoba were way richer than most cities in Europe.
Spain forbid slavery in 1512 and declared all native people equal to Europeans. England by contrast only forbid slavery in 18XX, and only because they used it as an excuse to occupy and colonize Africa.
You could not compare the West conquest of the US(and the extermination of the native population) at the end of 19th century, start of 20th century, with things like rail roads to the Spanish colonization that ended before industrialization.
I only expect you not to be American, first because if you are you are probably over some land stolen and plundered from some native people, and second because it is the country that currently plunders and exploits other countries like Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya.
You could say the same thing about the US today if you remove the illusion of success that means the petrodollar and the exploitation of the rest of the world that it represents.
Somewhere around 90% of the indigenous population of North America had succumbed to disease before the United States even existed.
What is good about Smith's description is that he includes the factors mentioned here as well as a number of others which together give a very good explanation for why the industrial revolution had to happen in Europe and England in particular.
1) As mentioned the fragmentation of Europe gave competition of ideas, and avoided the intellectual stagnation of the great arab and eastern empires.
2) Coast line and river relative to landmass is crucial. You thin land e.g. given more relative coastline than circular. Hence America, Africa and China are poor fits. You also want many rivers criss crossing and not just a few going one direction. WHY? Because before railroads, transport by water will be crucial. Massive amounts of specialization is needed for industrialization. That requires being able to ship products out to as many people as possible cheaply. You can only achieve that with lots of easily available water transport combined with high population density. There is no country fitting that description that Britain in the 1700s. No country had as high population density and high density of rivers and coastline relative to landmass as them.
In fact the country starting a sort of earlier industrial revolution was the Netherlands which had a similar advantage. Due to being under the sea level, digging canals was very easy. So they could dig a lot of them and transport goods cheaply. The Netherlands had nothing else of important resources, they just had high population density combined with an extensive canal network. That made the Netherlands the richest country in the world per capita in the 1600s.
3) Institutions. Adam Smith compares these extensively between the North and South of America. The Portuguese and Spanish possessions had very unfavorable institutions and social structures for economic development. Unlike North America they let a few elites take all the land. It ended up like a sort of feudal system were people worked at the local castle and village for their "lord". In contrast North America was divided into lots of small patches of land with competing farmers selling their products in a free market. North America inherited British rule of law, rather than rule of men, so businessmen in North America could feel safe lending money or investing in ventures with more powerful individuals. In the south you could never know if you'd get your money back from some well connected individual, because written laws mattered little, but connections was everything.
In short I think the receipt for industrialization is many small competing states, lots of rivers and coastline with dense population combined with strong institutions. By strong institutions one might instead say that rule of law is observed combined with some form of democratic or power sharing traditions.
e.g.: Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World -- N. Ferguson
By coincidence, I am reading Alfred Zimmern's The Greek Commonwealth, which has extensive discussion of the economics of classical Athens. The government there had no budget, just a bunch of containers for funds for different purposes, and new expenses were just voted on, along with how the money would be raised, as they came up.
Netherlands and Portugal had an empire in Africa and Asia. The commerce with them and north of Europe(via the Hanseatic League) is what made Netherlands the richest country per capita.
North America was created under totally different circumstances than South America.
For instance, Spanish and French went to Louisiana but could not control the Mississippi river. It was a very hard place to live filled with Mosquitoes that transmitted illnesses that killed most people.
France exchanged that for a small piece of land(Guyane), and it was a good deal at the time.
That this place could later become one of the most fertile places on Earth is only possible because of lots of scientific discoveries that happened later in time, like the combustion engine making possible moving enormous amount of land(creating dykes), DDT killing the mosquitoes, railroads for transporting the grain and the capital generated being reinvested in further development.
We could not extract political narratives for comparing 20th century empires to 15th.
Most people used in the West conquest to native population came from rail roads. Rail roads did not exist before 1850, way later to Spain and Portugal starting to lose territories in America.